Reliable link routing in Cognitive Radio networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) is an emerging technology to deal with the shortcoming of today's fixed spectrum management. In cognitive radio networks (CRN), a secondary user can dynamically access the idle licensed spectrum if no primary user occupies it. Compared to traditional fixed spectrum management policy, CR is able to improve the spectrum efficiency. However, it also presents some research challenges because the link is unreliable in CRN. In this paper we propose a novel reliable link routing (RLR) that specifically considers spectrum mobility. The proposed hybrid routing protocol combines proactive and reactive routing approach according to different conditions. To reduce the overhead that results from flooding and link failures, every secondary user selects reliable relays to forward packets with more reliable links. Simulation result shows that RLR is a viable routing solution to address the dynamic characteristics in CRN.